


Interview With the Librarian

by tambrathegreat



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-07
Updated: 2015-07-07
Packaged: 2018-04-08 05:40:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4292835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tambrathegreat/pseuds/tambrathegreat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Percy's life has hit a few snags.  Blaise has an offer for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interview With the Librarian

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Rare Pair Fest on Livejournal. The prompt that started this mess is at the end of the chapter.
> 
> Thanks to Lady Zombie and Imablack for their beta-work on this fic. Any mistakes remaining are my own.
> 
> I do no own Harry Potter, I make no money from this endeavor. The house elf character is my own, however.

There comes a time in a man's life, when his marriage has failed, his wife has left him for a much older and richer man, and his workplace has deemed him redundant, that a man might realize his life's choices weren't the best. Most would. However, Percy Weasley, to whom all this had happened, was not one of those men. 

 

As he shrank and subsequently packed his burgeoning bookshelves, all rare tomes, and placed his other meagre possessions in a small carryall, he felt content in a superior way, that he had made the best of everything. It was just that priggish superciliousness that had caused his wife to run straight into the arms of another man. It was just that air of oblivious superiority that had finally caused Kingsley to listen to the exasperated department heads in the New and Improved Ministry for Magic, and let his one time right hand man go. It was just that almost savant lack of self-awareness that led Headmaster Snape (once dead, but now resurrected) to take pity on the one Weasley who never quite set his teeth on edge, and speak to Kingsley about creating a new position as the head (and only) librarian in labyrinthine Legal Library of the Ministry, a place that had only been manned by house elves to date. It also dispensed with Snape's need to field any more messages from the Weasley matriarch and fellow Phoenix member on her son's behalf. Done and done was Snape's new motto. 

 

The embattled Minister took the suggestion with alacrity, much relieved that he would also no longer have to bear the vituperative comments directed at him from the same quarter.

 

Audrey waited in the hallway, her belly heavy with another man's spawn, her expression at once severe and relieved. Their fifteen year marriage had been a trial for her, his lack of sex drive one of the major reasons she had filed for divorce other than the aforementioned obvious reasons. She placed her hands protectively over her burgeoning belly as she said, "I hope you got it all. The new owners will be here in a week." 

 

"Yes, Audrey." Percy's attention was focused on the buckle of the carryall into which he had placed his life, meagre though it was. If there was one moment of regret in the entire fiasco of the last year, it was that Percy had acknowledged that he was much less interested in Audrey as a woman than he should have been. He wasn't sure why that was and he didn't care to reflect on it further than the acknowledgement of the issue. It just wasn't his way to reflect on anything overlong.

 

Self-examination would most definitely lead to some interesting questions and hard answers. 

One such source of a question was at the bottom of the box of books; a dog-eared Muggle periodical which catered to a more male only type of erotica. Percy, the prig, dared not even think on why he had enjoyed that type of male on male relief of his tensions over a more staid game of slap and tickle with his wife. He certainly did not wish to think that he was closer in sexual orientation to Albus Dumbledore than to his firmly heterosexual brothers, less Charlie, of course. 

 

As Percy left his one time home, he trudged to the Leaky Cauldron. It was the only available place for

the time being. His new job just didn't pay as well as his last one did.

&*&*&

A year later found Percy in the deepest bowels of the Ministry, a curator of the unwanted flotsam and jetsam of centuries of legal manoeuvrings by the Ministry; a library of sorts comprised of moulding, brittle parchments and musty tomes of dry law. His pay grade had stayed the same whilst the economy had improved from the post-war downturn. Percy had no choice but to live in his office: a dismal windowless corner of the library that had been converted from an under-utilized, turn of the Twentieth Century Coroner's office, complete with corpse sized drawers in the walls, a dodgy plumbing system, and an ancient house elf named Moribund who made no effort to cover the fact that he resented Percy's intrusion into his demesne.

 

In that year no one had once used the library. Oh, there had been an uptick of traffic during the holidays, most especially during the season of departmental parties in which alcohol had played an important part in the trysts that had happened in the stacks of parchment and dusty tomes. And when Percy had made his presence known to the interlopers, on more than one occasion he had been met with baffled comments, such as, _"I thought that bloke was dead. Hadn't seen him around in such a while."_

 

Or, _"The only place he couldn't insult anyone. I bet, with that stick so far up his arse, even Shackelbolt couldn't stand him..."_

 

The comments pained Percy in a way that his own wife's defection had not. Percy was dedicated to his job, no matter what it might entail. To know that he had failed the Minister hurt him more than anything Audrey had ever done. The end of the holidays had brought those painful comments to a halt. No one had visited since.

 

So, on a grey and featureless March day, it was with some surprise that the heavy, panelled doors swung open letting in a figure that Percy had not seen since The Final Battle. The dark, svelte figure of Blaise Zabini stood perfectly framed in the double doors to the library. 

Percy stifled a groan, as a flood of the disturbing images he had suppressed came back to him. Images from the wizarding and Muggle magazines that still resided in the valise under Percy's makeshift bed. Blaise Zabini, notorious shirt lifter at Hogwarts, was, at least in part, what had caused the older man to peripherally question his sexuality. Percy had always liked tall, dark, and definitely handsome.

 

The man looked about for a moment, and then said in that haughty Slytherin way of his, "Weasley, just the man I needed to see."

 

Zabini made his way into the room, dodging several boxes of new parchments that had flown down from the MLE just that day, scowling at the dust his progress towards Percy made, and coming to a stop in front of the redhead. He said, with remarkably less malice than Percy himself would have had their positions been reversed, "This seems to be a step down from Head Boy to the Minister, doesn't it?"

 

Percy bristled at the double entendre, but still felt a needling sense of relief that at least someone knew he was still alive and possibly of value to them.

&*&*&

Moribund could not be said to be a good house elf. He had never aspired to the jobs at which most house elves excelled. He had never liked children, didn't particularly like cleanliness, and refused to take orders from some jumped up, magical ape if it could at all be avoided. Thus, he had made plans for the last few months to get rid of the latest in a long line of monkey-men who tried to tell him what to do. That the interloper now living in Moribund's domain had taken up permanent residence in the place the house elf had made his own over the years was just one more reason for him to look for weakness in the orange haired human and thus dispose of the house elf's problems once and for all. He would follow these two humans and see if a weakness could be exploited.

&*&*&

Percy meticulously searched through the documents, fighting off the unnerving feeling that Zabini was purposefully making a haphazard mess of Percy's meticulously wrought filing system. It had taken him a full year to even make a dent in the ordering of documents, books, and such. As Zabini pulled down a pile of parchments and went through them, shuffling them out of order as he did, Percy fought the urge to snatch them out of Blaise's hands. "If you would just tell me what you were looking for, perhaps I could be of more assistance."

 

Blaise didn't pause in his shuffling, "I have told you, you just don't listen."

 

"You said you were looking for items related to Muggle-wizarding relations." Percy bit his lip fretfully. "You're looking in the section pertaining to goblins and their effect on Muggle banking institutions." 

"So I am." Blaise's equanimity was maddening. "I can't help it if you don't see how the two are tied together."

 

"I do." Percy took a deep breath. "Of course I do. It's just that you're making a hash of my system. You've mucked about and mixed several centuries together in one stack... you've mixed the French Rothschild's goblins with the English ones, and..." Percy sniffed at the sound of Zabini's tapping toe, and snatched up several parchments and snapping them sharply to align them. "I don't like... disorder."

 

"And you think that I do?" Zabini raked Percy with a scathing look before he went back to shuffling papers. Percy had the distinct impression that the Slytherin was getting much more enjoyment out of the exchange than was strictly necessary. Blaise reached for the parchments that Percy still held, his fingers sliding along the older man's wrist as he did. Zabini smirked as Percy inhaled sharply. It seemed as if the touch was made of energy.

 

The Slytherin returned his attention to one of the parchments wrested from Percy's grasp, his copy quill coming to life as he read it. The dry scritching sound of quill on paper filled the room. Suddenly, Zabini discarded the parchment in his hand and he headed off to the stacks, leaving Percy to reorder the mountain of documents that had been put in disarray, even as Blaise shouted from the aisle, "Don't muck about with those parchments, Weasley. I'll just have to spread them out before me again."

 

As Percy righted the first few parchments with shaking hands at the thought of being the object spread out before Zabini, he heard a loud crash and muffled cursed coming from deep in the stacks. Percy hissed. It would not do for Zabini to come to harm in Percy's library. He was one of the best solicitors in the Malfoy family's vast business enterprises.

&*&*&

Oh yes, Moribund saw exactly what he needed. The hated human interloper was more than interested in the nut-brown human who had invaded his space that morning. Moribund had a nose for such things and he could definitely smell interested pheromones on both of them.

Moribund knew why it was so with the red-headed interloper too. 

 

In those naughty magazines that the interloper thought he had hidden so well, one of the photos was of a pale, red-headed human being rogered by a rather well-endowed nut brown human who looked remarkably like the new brown interloper. It was a picture that the red interloper sometimes groaned over more than once with a great deal of hand movement and stinking sweat. Moribund knew what those smells were made for, even though the times the interloper had made them, he'd been alone.

 

Moribund flicked his fingers and several photos, all with the same type naughty content, flew to his waiting hand. Moribund knew what the nut-brown wizard was looking for, and could have retrieved the items in trice had the interloper just let him do his job. He knew exactly where to place the naughty pictures. Hopefully their presence would apply the right kind of pressure, and wizardy bonding would take place. He hoped that the bonding would be enough to cause the nut-brown one to offer to take the red interloper away.

 

He waved his fingers in a complex series of motions, reciting an ancient spell that would ensure success for this venture Perhaps it was a perversion of custom to not work it on wizards that could produce heirs, but match-making was match-making and Moribund was a desperate elf..

&*&*&

Percy followed Zabini around the library, trying to control the chaos of the man's hunt whilst he answered questions about his filing system. At first he had thought Zabini to be poking fun at his strictures, but warmed to the subject once he realized the Slytherin had at least a passing interest in the ordered way Percy's mind worked. It was a new sensation, the attention paid to him by Zabini. Percy recognized he could be a bit pedantic when it came to subjects that interested him. His year in exile had made him realise that about himself. He had tried with varying degrees of failure to reign that tendency in when he made his monthly trip to the Burrow, but Zabini didn't seem to mind.

 

The Slytherin turned suddenly, coming face to face with Percy, and reached above his head, pressing his firm thighs into the older man's legs. Percy was treated to a large expanse of delicately drawn throat with a pulse that seemed to beat in a syncopated rhythm to the pulsing of Weasley's anatomy lower down. Percy sniffed that exposed skin, and then delicately tasted the spice and citrus laden air around it.

 

"Weasley, did you just... sniff me?" Zabini asked as he pulled down the book he needed and stepped away. "Not that I mind, it's just..." 

 

Zabini muttered as he opened the book. He snapped for his dicto-quill to begin writing as his fingers skimmed over the words he read. After a few moments he turned the page. A piece of slick paper fluttered to the ground, which Zabini snatched up, turning it so that Percy couldn't see. Zabini slanted a look of disbelief at Percy before he asked, "What's this?"

 

Percy, who had idly been wondering what it might be like to have those acquisitive fingers strum his own skin instead of the leaves of the books, straightened his posture and ran a self-conscious hand over the front of his trousers. "I'm sure I can't tell you if you don't show me what it is."

 

Zabini stepped closer, a wicked smile playing around his lips. "Either that sneaking house elf of yours has some odd fantasies that will go unacknowledged," Blaise said as he turned the small scrap of paper towards Percy, "Or you do." 

 

Percy glanced down at the image on the paper. He knew it well, having masturbated to it often enough that he was no longer disappointed in the unmoving nature of Muggle photography. He stood frozen in place, his mouth working without sound, his face heated with mortification.

 

"What's that, Weasley?" Blaise asked, that wicked smile slashing across his face exposing impossibly white teeth and an attractive pink tongue, "You asked what are the odds of those fantasies being acknowledged by me?"

 

Zabini gave the photograph a mockingly considered look before he leaned in and said against Percy's lips, "I came here today to see if you would be an asset to my law practice. I can always use a good researcher."

 

Zabini's tongue flicked out, leaving a hot trail across Percy's lower lip. 

 

"Snape sent me. He doesn't like waste, you see. And it's obvious that you are wasted here." That wicked tongue ghosted into Percy's mouth, causing the older man to squeak before he opened further to that questing appendage that was disappointingly withdrawn.

 

"I have a position for you." Blaise leaned in further, pinning Percy against the shelves. "Several very satisfying ones that I can think of right now..."

 

He kissed Weasley then, deepening the contact momentarily before withdrawing again. He moved away, but not before Percy saw the evidence of the effect he had on Zabini. "Oh, and I also have a job for you, if you want it. It’s one that pays much better than Ministry scale."

 

Zabini pulled the picture from between Percy's numb fingers and made a show of putting it in the breast pocket of his opened robes. "I'll let you think all of this over, Weasley. I'll be back tomorrow, and if you say yes to the job, I think we can come up with better things to do with your last days at the Ministry than muck up your filing system."

&*&*&

Moribund watched from the shelves above the interlopers. He loved it when his plans came to fruition and this one had been in play for months.

 

He would have to send a basket of fruit to his cousin who worked in the Hogwarts kitchens for suggesting to the Great Headmaster that the red-interloper was not suited for his new job. He would also send a bottle of wine to the Great Headmaster, who Moribund knew, was not fooled one bit by the origins of his elf cousin’s suggestions. The Great Headmaster was a canny wizard, one of the few that Moribund could stand. 

 

Moribund looked forward to setting the library to rights again. The red interloper wasn’t the only creature that had very particular standards.

**Author's Note:**

> They really need that specific book, but isn't it a pity they have to borrow it from Percy Weasley, of all people? Yes, he's got a really extensive private library, and it's already taken far too long just to locate a copy, but...well...Percy Weasley.
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks for reading. Please take the time to let me know what you think.


End file.
